Re: Backgrounding part of 'ssh-agent $cmd'

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Jan 16,  8:59am, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
} Subject: Backgrounding part of 'ssh-agent $cmd'
}
} More specifically, my workflow involves establishing several 'ssh -MNf'
} connections every morning

Are you running this on an Xorg desktop?  Some Xorg distributions set
up ssh-agent directly under the session manager so all applications
on the desktop use the same agent.  Unless you specifically need to
run a separate agent for this, you might check whether one is already
available.  I source a file from my .zlogin that looks like this
(details elided):

  (( SSH_AGENT_PID )) || return 0
  [[ $(ssh-add -L) = *"no identities"* ]] || return 0
  ssh-add ...

The ssh-add command in this setup is clever enough to invoke zenity or
gdialog or the equivalent to pop up a window for the password.  Have
you tried something like

    ssh-add ~/.ssh/foo.id_rsa </dev/null >>& .ssh-add-errors

to see if it finds some other way to prompt you?  If that works, then
you can just background the entire foo_ssh_preseed call, whether or
not you already have an ssh-agent for the desktop session.